Here is our weekly feature in which we share the top articles we enjoyed from the past week about recruitment marketing. This week we’ll be talking about ways to optimize using LinkedIn, candidate experience, thinking strategically, social recruiting and HR playing some offense.

Here are the articles our that interested us this week (in no particular order), enjoy!:

Free LinkedIn Profile Optimization and Job Seeker Advice by Glen Cathey (@GlenCathey)

Glen provides some of the best free tools for recruiting and sourcing. Here are some great videos from Glen, that take you through how you better effectively use LinkedIn to get found.

Candidate Experience and Common Sense by Tim Sackett (@TimSackett)

Another take on Candidate Experience and I like Tim’s common sense approach. I agree that candidates will only respond negatively to a recruiting experience only if it is truly awful and there are some very small things that can be done to improve the overall candidate experience and make it manageable.

Being Strategic and Creating Strategy are not the same thing by Sharlyn Lauby (@Sharlyn_Lauby)

Nice post by Sharlyn that looks into how we need to develop a competency for strategic thinking. I love that she brought analytics into the discussion.

HR Plays too much defense by Paul Hebert (@incentintel)

If you’ve worked with an HR organization before, you’ve most undoubtedly come across a situation like Paul talks about. A great post on how HR is meant to enhance the overall business not just be playing defense.

Is social recruiting an “active” or “passive” talent acquisition st... by Omowale Casselle (@mysensay)

A good question posed by Omowale! Overall, I would say it’s a bit of both given companies an opportunity to engage with candidates more often (active) and providing candidates with a repository of information on the company to do research on their own (passive).

Hope you enjoy the list. If you have any articles I should add to the list feel free to add them to the comments or send me an email at chris@smashfly.com or follow us on Twitter @smashfly.

Originally posted on the SmashFly Recruitment Marketing Blog.